Beams: Triming / Coping an Angle to Angle profile

marten_hutchison

I'm having a hard time understanding how to get an angle profile to trim and cope into another angle profile i.e. building a box frame.  I also tried mitres but I got strange results.  An example file would be great.

NeilCooke

OK the reason the second set was flipping was because you were selecting edges from different sketches. Hide all sketches except Sketch2 and try again.

The second issue is the cross beams not trimming - must be a bug I will have to look into it.

marten_hutchison

Punchline:  Trim & Cope works with dissimilar cross section materials, thin material trimmed against thick, but not equal thicknesses.  If the materials are equal flange thickness then its iffy whether the script will figure out how to do the trim.

NeilCooke

Using the L angle profiles should just work. Can you post a picture or a link to your Document where it isn't?

marten_hutchison

Here the link and I shared with Support.

I was getting slightly quirky behavior.  On the first beam set I selected all 4 edges on one side, and it appropriately turned all of them to face inward.  I tried the same thing on the opposite side and the 4 edges wouldn't behave the same way.  I tried various combinations of selecting other edges but got mixed results.

I also tried all combinations of Mitred ends, Coped ends, Trimmed ends, but never appeared to get satisfactory results other than the first beam set which is mitered.

There's two tabs with differing attempts at creating a frame.

Its still great software and my go to as my Fusion skills stagnate.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ad433d189aa3542c517c5201/w/fb9da18fc09e9bc3f911afbf/e/ed84d52c6fec8046b8bfeff2

NeilCooke

OK the reason the second set was flipping was because you were selecting edges from different sketches. Hide all sketches except Sketch2 and try again.

The second issue is the cross beams not trimming - must be a bug I will have to look into it.

marten_hutchison

So the legs of the angle will orient themselves based on the sketch they are a part of?  So I should think in terms of planes of fabrication i.e. primary faces, and then planes that cross connect those primaries.

marten_hutchison

So doing a sketch at a time and understanding that they drive the orientation behavior cleared up my first problem - thanks.

However the coping isn't working, sort of.  I did manage to get one end of a mid piece to cope on one end but not the other using the Cope and Trim commands.  I think its because the software doesn't acknowledge the radiused edge of the angle, its looking for a plane.

Oh and the ability to make an array of bolt holes in the angle and then apply it to three pieces all in one extrude command - ROCKS.

marten_hutchison

Selecting a vertex for a butt joint plus selecting coped will do what I want (create a coped end) but it only works for n-1 corners i.e. 3 out of 4, on selecting the fourth the angle frame disappears.  The directional arrow that appears at the vertex changes the direction of the cope.

marten_hutchison

Got it, play with the directional arrows until you get what you want.  Not intuitive, needs to be more straight forward.

marten_hutchison

The last post was the perimeter parts.  I still can't get interior pieces to cope properly.  One  interior piece worked like a charm when I selected parts to trim to on either end.  Tried exactly the same technique on a similar interior part on a different perimeter frame and the interior part vanished, no combo of settings would get it to cope.  Not consistent.

marten_hutchison

Punchline:  Trim & Cope works with dissimilar cross section materials, thin material trimmed against thick, but not equal thicknesses.  If the materials are equal flange thickness then its iffy whether the script will figure out how to do the trim.

NeilCooke

@marten_hutchison I am releasing a new beam script next week that should fix this issue